Center Party of Germany

The Center Party of Germany is a conservative and Catholic political party in Germany, founded on 13 December 1870. The party battled against the Kulturkampf campaign of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, defending the power of the Catholic church; it won a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag due to its championing of Catholic rights. During the early 1930s, the party supported the Nazi Party due to its nationalist and conservative stances, and it was banned under Nazi Germany after the creation of a single-party state. In 1945, the party was re-created after the end of World War II, but most of its members joined the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, and it became a minor party in North Rhine-Westphalia.